Sara slams ‘budget-driven’ impeachment plot

Sara slams ‘budget-driven’ impeachment plot | Daily Tribune

Vice President Sara Duterte on Monday denounced alleged brewing efforts by some members of the House of Representatives to file another impeachment complaint against her once the one-year bar lapses in February.

Duterte branded the move a “budget-driven racket,” alleging that lawmakers are being lured to support the initiative in exchange for larger budget allocations, citing previous statements by then Senate President Chiz Escudero and Navotas Rep. Toby Tiangco.

“Their statements have unmasked the truth that the impeachment complaint against me was never really driven by principle but by price,” she said.

Duterte lamented that the lack of an investigation to hold to account those responsible for “squandering” billions of pesos, notwithstanding the bribery allegations made by some members of Congress, only reveals the ulterior motive behind her sought-for ouster.

Nevertheless, she noted that the rumors of a looming impeachment complaint no longer come as a surprise, saying that the “timing reveals a pattern that has become all too familiar.”

“Now, this constitutional mechanism is being dangled once again as a bargaining chip right before the 2026 national budget is passed. To those who continue to exploit the impeachment process, stop hiding behind the language of ‘good governance, ’” the VP said.

On 2 December last year, Duterte faced her first impeachment complaint filed by civil society groups in the House, followed two days later by a second complaint.

The third impeachment complaint followed two weeks later, but all were unsuccessful in mustering enough political support until the fourth petition was filed on 5 February.

A total of 215 lawmakers, the majority of them allied with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., signed the fourth impeachment. The figure was more than double the required 1/3 votes of the entire House, resulting in the immediate transmittal of the articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.

The House laid out seven articles of impeachment, centered on Duterte’s alleged assassination threats against Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and then Speaker Martin Romualdez, and the purported misappropriation of her multimillion-peso confidential funds.

Duterte has repeatedly denied the allegations of corruption, insisting that her confidential funds were lawfully used and her remarks about assassinating the First Couple and Speaker were “taken out of context.”

Duterte was the first Vice President impeached by the House on grounds of graft and corruption, bribery, betrayal of public trust, culpable violation of the Constitution, and other high crimes.

The Senate proceedings, however, faced delays, reportedly because it could not hold a trial during the election campaign break and because the case could not be carried over from the 19th to the 20th Congress.

The impeachment proponents accused Escudero of deliberately stalling the trial to keep his position as Senate president, citing the chamber’s dominance by allies of the Vice President.

Following his ouster in September, Escudero corroborated Tiangco’s earlier claim and explicitly identified then House Speaker Martin Romualdez as the mastermind behind the fourth impeachment complaint.

He accused Romualdez of exploiting the House’s “for later release” mechanism to pressure lawmakers into signing the petition, warning that their allocations would not be released before the midterm polls otherwise.

Escudero had no qualms about implicating Romualdez in the impeachment attempt, saying his “greed” overtook him in pushing for the “unconstitutional” complaint even if it did not have the President’s imprimatur.

Romualdez, in response, brushed off Escudero’s scathing privilege speech, calling it a “DDS (Diehard Duterte Supporters) script,” far from being an exposé.

In July, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision that put an end to the impeachment fiasco. The Court declared the articles of impeachment “unconstitutional,” null, and void ab initio (from the beginning) for violating the one-year bar, which prohibits the filing of more than one impeachment case against the same official within one year.

The SC ruled that the House’s expediting the fourth impeachment complaint trampled Duterte’s right to due process and that the transmittal of the articles of impeachment to the Senate was irregular.

The SC ruling stated that when the 19th Congress ended without the House acting on the first three complaints, the same were “effectively terminated and dismissed,” from which the one-year bar was reckoned.

The House prosecution panel, however, countered that the one-year bar was “never circumvented” because the initiation was only triggered when the fourth complaint mustered more than a one-third vote, a prerequisite in the impeachment process.

The House argued that the SC, in effect, introduced a new interpretation of the one-year bar, which the SC itself outlined under Francisco v. House of Representatives and Gutierrez v. Committee on Justice.

Under existing jurisprudence, impeachment proceedings can only be initiated after the complaint is referred to the House Committee on Justice or filed with the secretary-general by at least one-third of all House members.

In her petition before the SC, Duterte alleged that the House deliberately froze the first three impeachment complaints and did not refer them to the Speaker’s office to avoid triggering the one-year constitutional bar while it awaited the fourth impeachment complaint.

The House challenged the SC’s decision despite the latter declaring it “immediately executory.”

This rendered the impeachment case against the VP unresolved and pending before the SC.

Duterte has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, calling the impeachment a “well-funded” and “coordinated political attack” meant to derail her plan to run for president in the 2028 elections.

She is reportedly seen as the frontrunner in the next presidential election and consistently leads surveys as the preferred successor to Marcos.